The Tiobe index is total rubbish. But it’s worse than useless. It’s actually harmful. As Tyler Cowen mentioned in his TED Talk, “Be suspicious of stories”, feeling like you know what’s going on is way worse than admitting you don’t have a clue:

The most dangerous people are those that have been taught some financial literacy

Undoubtedly, there are people out there choosing careers and technologies based on the information age’s “divining by chicken bones”. Tiobe is based on search engine hits for goodness sake. In the uber-democratic-everyone’s-a-technical-blogger web, of what is “talking about a language” a good indicator? Here is a primary one: that the language and its tools are not sufficient to support development. In other words, the Niobe Index (i.e. search engine results) is inversely proportional to language quality, as seen below:

Since the equation above is obviously scientific (because it seems “mathy” and nerdy), it must be true. Furthermore (another great smart-people word), if one believes in (yes, like Santa Claus) the Niobe index (which can only be believed because it superficially seems scientific), one must believe my equation, which creates a paradox (another great science-y term).

In a live, open, dynamic environment (like Smalltalk*), the programmer has at their fingertips most of the things they would otherwise be forced to search the internet for, which is succinctly described by Torsten Bergmann. Also, working in a low level language, like C++ (e.g. manual memory management), guarantees search engine love. I used to need a Safari Books membership just to make sure I didn’t shoot myself in the foot.